David Hempton

Professor of Church History
University Professor

BA, Queen's University Belfast
PhD, St. Andrews University, Scotland

Dr. Hempton's Publications

David Hempton is University Professor and Professor of Church History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and former Professor of Modern History and Director of the School of History in the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is a former chairman of the Wiles Trust founded in 1951 by Sir Herbert Butterfield to promote innovative thinking on the history of civilization, broadly conceived. He has held fellowships from the Wolfson and Nuffield Foundations and has been visiting scholar at St. John’s College Oxford. He has delivered several sets of endowed lectures including the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham (1994) and the F. D. Maurice Lectures at King’s College London (2000). He is the author of many books and articles including: Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850 (Stanford University Press, 1984), winner of the Whitfield prize of the Royal Historical Society; ‘Methodism in Irish Society 1770-1830’ proxime accessit for the Alexander Medal of the Royal Historical Society (1986); Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society 1740-1890 (Routledge, 1992); Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996); The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion c. 1750-1900 (Routledge, 1996);‘Faith and Enlightenment’ in the New Oxford History of the British Isles (2002); and Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale University Press, 2005), winner of the Jesse Lee Prize. He has research and teaching interests in European religious history, religion and political culture, identity and ethnic conflict, the interdisciplinary study of popular religion, and the rise of Methodism in the British Isles and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was Boston University’s scholar/teacher of the year in 2004.